


The Man In The Moon Came Tumbling Down

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Scatterings of History (Publication Order) [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Actual History Not Included, Camelot, Gen, Historical, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23135125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Aziraphale has a discussion with Merlin, who is very observant but has reached an entirely wrong conclusion.
Series: Scatterings of History (Publication Order) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634191
Comments: 27
Kudos: 155





	The Man In The Moon Came Tumbling Down

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since a remarkably vivid dream I had once, my Merlin will always be fancast as Idris Elba. This is probably very lazy of my subconscious mind, since Idris Elba gets fancast in _everything,_ but I'm afraid that's just the way it's going to be.

Merlin had his locks drawn back into a messy sort of ponytail and the ponytail shoved under his tunic for good measure. It itched. It was also worth it to keep his hair well free of the substance he had invented. Merlin hadn't named the stuff yet, but it was nasty.

"Scratch all the way through the wax, down to the metal," he instructed the one other person in his workshop. "The fluid won't dissolve wax."

"Won't mar wax, but _will_ put a mark in steel," Sir Aziraphale mused, cutting a twisty symbol into the wax that coated the practice sword. "Does that seem odd to you?"

He had to be careful, Merlin thought. He'd had experiments flat-out refuse to work when Sir Aziraphale was in the room, only to function perfectly well when the peculiar knight was busy elsewhere, and the common factor seemed to be whether Sir Aziraphale _thought_ they were likely to work. "You can do much the same trick with dye," Merlin said. "Wax is humble, but it has many impressive properties." And some day, he _would_ work out why. He reassured himself that the etching substance was secure and walked over to look at the symbols on the sword.

Sir Aziraphale was concentrating too hard on his work to acknowledge Merlin's interest. "You know," Merlin said after a moment, "I recognize fewer than half those symbols." He studied the blunt waxed blade. "Lack of . . . motion? Stasis?"

"'Remain as thou art,'" Sir Aziraphale said, "roughly translated."

Merlin let out a breath. "It's true, then."

Instant wariness, the look of a man who had been run out of town before. "I'm not sure what you're talking about."

"I mean that a practice blade transformed into live steel in your hand and you wounded Sir Bors badly. Badly enough that you couldn’t be discreet about how much you healed him."

The wariness transmuted into guilt. "I could have killed him," Sir Aziraphale whispered.

"Mm. Under the circumstances, I think it's best to concentrate on the fact that you _didn't,_ and go from there." Merlin sat down backwards in the nearest chair, resting his arms on the back and propping his chin on them. “You need to be careful.”

“I was trying to be! I thought, I’m better suited to training than missions anyway, I can teach sword tricks that nobody in this country knows, but then it all got too _real_ and I—” He broke off.

“I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about how you handle what comes next.” Sir Aziraphale’s face showed incomprehension. “Galahad,” Merlin explained, “is a bloody fanatic.”

Sir Aziraphale grimaced in irritation at the thought of the younger knight, but offered, “He means well.”

“Galahad is a bloody fanatic. Galahad is a bloody _superstitious_ fanatic. It would be just like him to decide that God transformed the blade in your hand because Bors committed some secret crime and you are the instrument of his vengeance. So what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Sir Aziraphale admitted. He turned the blade over and began carving the same spell—and unlike most of the things Merlin did, this actually _was_ a spell—into the wax on the other side.

“Hmm. You could have a dream, you know. A struggle against a demon who swore to make you a murderer, only you fought it off with virtue. Something like that. Galahad would eat that up.”

Sir Aziraphale’s mouth fell open. “But that would be lying!”

Merlin sighed. He had the greatest of respect for Sir Aziraphale’s intelligence and scholarly abilities. He had less than a thimbleful of respect for Sir Aziraphale’s common sense. There was a _reason_ why Arthur never sent him unaccompanied on diplomatic missions anymore. And that was despite being able to talk almost anyone down from violence, and appease anyone's insulted honor, and appeal to the best in people that Merlin would have sworn didn’t have a best. The idea that people weren’t telling him the truth—or, even moreso, the idea that people would break their sworn word—seemed to blindside and wound him every time.

It wasn’t naivete—he had seen far too much to be naive—and it wasn’t stupidity . . . exactly. The more Merlin looked at it, the more he wondered if it was something basic in the way the knight was made. That maybe he entirely lacked a spleen, or a gall-bladder, or wherever the _suspicious bastard_ humors were supposed to emanate from.

He also wasn’t always good with sarcasm either. Maybe it was part of the same thing.

“You lie all the time,” Merlin said finally, and then, deciding to take a risk, “moon man.”

“Wha—”

“I know you’re not an Earthly mortal. That doesn’t leave very many places. And I don’t hold with the Christian idea that the moon is just a mirror reflecting the continents. I think it has _landscape._ I suppose you could be from a further sphere, but when you can’t make out what you’re reading _and start to glow,_ it looks like moonlight. Are the reading lenses helpful, by the way?”

“Yes,”[1] Sir Aziraphale admitted, “but—”

“Good. At any rate, you lie every time someone asks you where you’re from. Every time there’s a particularly fortuitous coincidence. Every time someone pulls through when they really ought to be dead. But _I_ don’t care, and I’m not going to tell anyone. I come in for enough suspicion for looking like a foreigner myself; I’m not about to put anyone else in that position. And who else am I going to talk literature with?”

“I appreciate that,” Sir Aziraphale said. He looked for a moment as if he was going to say more, but closed his mouth instead.

“How about this? _I_ can tell people that the blade was some sort of demonic attack on the two of you, and you had a dream, etc, and you can virtuously deny it. That way, people will assume that you’re simply being too modest to claim any sort of victory against the devil, and you won’t have to do any actual lying, and they’ll believe it anyway. What?” Because Sir Aziraphale was giving him an odd look.

“Nothing,” Sir Aziraphale said, “you just—reminded me of someone. For a moment. I suppose—people are free to believe what they want to. I can’t actually _stop_ them. Or you.” He finished the twist on the last sigil.

That was as near as he was going to get to permission, Merlin judged. He stood up and took the blade. “You realize,” he said over his shoulder as he carried the blade to the etching tub, “it’s very unhelpful, when I try over and over again to tell people that the world is ruled by natural philosophy and what I do _isn’t actually magic—_ to have someone right next door doing magic.” He lowered the blade very carefully into the vile stuff. Maybe he could call it hyper-vitriol.

“I’ll do my best to be discreet,” Sir Aziraphale promised him. “How long is that going to take?”

Merlin lit a marked candle. “Less than an hour. You know, I’ve thought of trying to make designs on armor using this process, but I worry. Armor is thinner than a practice sword, or even a proper blade, and I wonder about producing weak points.”

“You could borrow an old suit, engrave it, and let the boys have at it for a while,” Sir Aziraphale suggested.

“Mm. Maybe, but I’d like to see them beat the devil out of a normal suit of armor, too. Just for purposes of comparison.” Merlin had strong feelings about purposes of comparison. You got a lot further in natural philosophy when you compared _everything_ you tried. “And I’d prefer you stay out of it.”

Sir Aziraphale gave him one of those startled, guilty looks.

“I don’t think anyone else has noticed that you’re as strong as a giant,” Merlin went on, “but I have. You’d skew the experiment.” If not ruin it altogether by believing it was going to turn out a certain way.

“You seem to have—noticed a lot.”

“What can I say? I’m incurably curious, inveterately nosy, and I’ve invented a sort of far-sight lenses. They were meant to help me confirm my ideas about the moon, but I also tested them by spying on training.” He just had to come up with a name for them. “By the way, have you finished that copy of _Psychomachia_ I lent you? Only I’m curious to hear what you thought of it.”

“I haven’t,” Sir Aziraphale admitted. “I’ve spent the last two nights looking after Bors.”

“Mm.” It was a somewhat open secret that if you were wounded, you wanted Sir Aziraphale to be in the general vicinity. Wounds that he helped tend didn’t get infected. And it was _also_ common knowledge that the various alchemical substances that Merlin used to prevent infection—although usually effective—burned like a son of a bitch, so really, you wanted Sir Aziraphale if you could get him. “How’s he doing?”

Sir Aziraphale sighed. “As long as he gets an interesting scar out of it, he’s happy. I don’t _understand_ Sir Bors sometimes.”

“I don’t understand any of the knights,” Merlin admitted. “I’m halfway convinced that spending so much time on combat does something to the humors. Predisposes one to be more combative.”

“Perhaps it’s the tools available,” Sir Aziraphale suggested. “When what you have is a sword, everything starts to look like . . .” He looked away.

“A pell?” Merlin offered, to spare him more gruesome comparisons. “You may have something there. How’s training going?”

“Oh! Well, I think training probably is the place for me. Despite what happened to Bors. The younger ones, you know, there isn’t such a danger of it—becoming real in my mind—and I really do have a bit that I can teach. Even if it’s only, ‘Don’t charge lance-first into every encounter, try diplomacy first.’ They all arrive anticipating glory, you know, determined to fight for the kingdom, and the idea that the kingdom might not, first and foremost, require fighting . . .”

Merlin sat back down, wrong way around on the chair again, and listened to his friend from the moon.

* * *

[1]Because Aziraphale thought they ought to be helpful, not because there was anything actually wrong with his eyesight. [ return to text ]


End file.
